


She Closed the Drawer

by elleorwhatever



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: F/M, Memories, prewar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-04
Updated: 2016-02-04
Packaged: 2018-05-18 05:06:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5899330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elleorwhatever/pseuds/elleorwhatever
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Evelyn has returned from a trip to the Institute.  She drinks at The Third Rail, and remembers a time before the war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	She Closed the Drawer

“Just give me the bottle, Charlie.”

Whitechapel Charlie swiveled his cams toward her and the caps she threw down on the bar. 

“Suit ye’ self,” he said,  sliding the vodka her way.

Evelyn topped off her glass.  She stared down into the glassy clarity of the alcohol, smelling the reassuring viciousness of it.  She had come in to take the edge off, but somewhere in the middle of her first drink the plan changed. 

The Third Rail was largely empty.  It was the middle of the day, and only a few truly dedicated alcoholics loitered in the dark humidity of the converted rail station.  Magnolia, just like most respectable citizens of Goodneighbor, wasn’t up.  The drifters and the thugs were hiding from the stink of the high-noon sun, drifting in little black hidey-holes upon jet-fuelled dreams.

Evelyn threw back her vodka.  She poured another glass.

She savored the white sear of the liquor.  She smoked, staring at her own white exhalations.  White, white, white.  White of the Institute walls.  The white of Father’s hair.  The white blanket she had wrapped around Shaun, the one with the fuzzy yellow ducks.  That was the day they carried him across the threshold of their home for the first time.

Father looked like Evelyn’s father.  He had Nate’s handsome jaw, the masculine nose.  But Father’s eyes swept up a little, and his skin had the golden tone that Evelyn’s parents had carried with them down the Huang Ho, across the East China Sea, the Pacific.  He was darker, of course.  Nate had been black.  But, Father looked like Evelyn’s father.

Evelyn thought about the color white.  She had had a white maternity day dress.  It was cotton, with cap sleeves.  A scoop neck, a-line.  It sat just above her ample stomach, and her swollen breasts had looked fantastic.

A song she loved played on the radio, its notes tangling with the hypnotic, sugared smell of lilacs outside the open window.  The neighborhood kids of Sanctuary shrieked as they played in the yards.  A car passed by.  The Johnstons and their _au pair_.  Snooty asshats.  Like having a live-in babysitter made you more interesting.

Evelyn sat at her vanity, wearing her white dress.  White always looked good on her.  She had met Nate wearing white.  She married him wearing white, too.  She admired her skin in the mirror, the way it warmed to the summer light like a lover.  Golden tan.  She could smell her floral body wash, and all the beauty products arrayed before her.  The rococo almost-sweetness of powder, the slightly chemical refinement of perfume.

The smells of a department store, of advertising and disposable income.

Evelyn stood, and picked up her handbag from the bed.  She stepped into a pair of pumps.  That was one of the things she missed the most.  The _shoes_.  She missed wearing heels that followed the line in her stockings all the way up, an undulating, curved wink she liked to feel people’s eyes on.

Evelyn walked out into the sunshine, out into the affluence of middleclass.  Mrs. Kapowski across the street pauses from trimming her rose bushes, waving at her.

“You’re _glowing_ , Evelyn,” she says.

The Glowing Sea.  The impenetrable green fog of fallout, the _click-click-click-click-click_ of her geiger counter, the ravaged valleys and hills of sterile land.  Nate holding her, telling her _breathe_ but she was floating away on an epidural fantasy but she had to push, she had to pull from her body new life.

Evelyn lays a hand on her stomach in the charming way pregnant women from time immemorial have had.

“You’re so sweet, Mrs. Kapowski,” she says. “Not much longer now.  Time is just flying by.”

“Treasure it while you can,” Mrs. Kapowski says, winking.

Evelyn sat down in the car her parents had bought for Nate and her as a wedding present.  It was beautiful.  She was encased in white leather trim, glittering steel chrome, dials and knobs, nuclear energy.  She was sitting in a symbol of her socio-economic mobility.  She started the car.

She drove, humming mindlessly.  Passing the Red Rocket station, the gas attendants swarmed like worker ants around great, hulking queens of steel and enamel and chrome.  She drove into the quaintness of Concord, the pedestrians walking sedately and dressed in the modest, clean clothes of their class.  Like a modern day Seurat, like an East Coast _Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte._

Evelyn parked at the Super-Duper Mart.

The automatic doors slid open for her, like a doorman in black coattails holding open the entrance to the estate.  The grocery store washed her in fluorescence, in the hygienic smell of  bleached linoleum.  An employee pulled out a shopping cart for her, from the pack of carts waiting idly to be filled, full and curved, only to be emptied again.

Evelyn, her heels clicking slowly, satisfyingly, guided her cart down the produce aisle.

Here, next to the rusted metal shelves, empty boxes of Dandy Boy Apples, she shot a raider in the face.  The smell of new blood over the burnt copper of old blood, the reek of urine and fecal matter, the dark, primordial smell of kitten birthing.  The raider fell, whimpering, gargling and dying.

Evelyn compared the prices of gala apples and pink lady apples.

Pink would have looked good in the baby room.  Frilly laces, ruffles, precious little dresses.  Downy stuffed bunnies, white bonnets.  They were having a boy, though.  Nate could teach him to play catch, how to be a man.  Evelyn’s parents were thrilled.   _A boy, a boy_ , her mother had cried.

The Super-Duper Mart had just the right amount of customers at this time.  Not crowded, but just enough of her fellow housewives for Evelyn to enjoy being seen.  She passed her peers, aware of her white dress, her glowing skin, the pleasant weight of her belly.  Sometimes these women looked at her, at her almond eyes and her moon-curved cheeks.  They thought, _Communist trash._

Evelyn smiled at them all.  Here, among the cardboard boxes of Blamco and the cellophane wrapped meat, butchered from livestock with one head, here everything was washed in the white light of consumerism.  This was the height of civilization, floating from her orderly home in a nuclear chariot to a place where she could trade paper for goods.

It must have been something like heaven.

Evelyn fumbled the vodka bottle, spilling it on the bar.

“Shit,” she said.

“You probably done ‘nough damage as is,” Whitechapel Charlie said.

She said nothing, looking at the millimeter high remainder in her glass.  How many did that make it?

At some point, The Third Rail had filled up a little more.  A few scavvers sat at the bar that had previously been empty.  Low chatter slinked around the tables.  Smoke clogged the air.  The day hadn’t gotten any cooler, though, and even here, underneath Goodneighbor, it was hot and damp.  She could hear Magnolia’s alto, touched with _vibrato_ , conversing with someone, somewhere.

Evelyn’s head swam.  She had the feeling her motor control was impaired, that she was already swaying and if she tried to move of her own volition, she’d pitch straight down into the icy depths of some empty void.

Someone sat beside her.

“You’re back,” said Hancock.

It startled her, not him sitting there, but her own reaction to it.  Relief washed over her like a warm tide.  She wanted to cry.  She leaned against him.  He was warm, not hot like the room and its fetid air, but warm.  He stilled, a little surprised maybe.

“And partying without me,” Hancock said. “Breakin’ my heart, doll.”

Evelyn didn’t say anything for a moment, enjoying the solid feeling of another person against her.  She wanted to reach out and hold his hand, but that might be pushing it.

“Light me a cigarette, Hancock,” she said.

The mayor obliged.  He pulled a cigarette and a lighter from his pocket, held the white wisp of a stick in his mouth as he lit it.  He passed it to her.

She clumsily took a drag.  They were silent for a moment.

“So,” he said. “Your son.  And his… _place of work_.”

She nodded.  This had been her second trip to the Institute.  To the white civilization buried underneath the rotted, pulsing Commonwealth.

She wondered what Father saw when he looked at her.  Did he see their shared pool of DNA, the cheekbones, the eyes.  Did he see some fuzzy, cooing shape from an infantile memory?  Did he know she could still smell the innocent sweetness of a baby when she looked at him?

“The man is a monster,” Evelyn said.

“And the worst of it is that he doesn’t even realize it.  He never will.”

Hancock was silent, looking at her.

She let her cigarette be burdened with ash.

“And it’s my responsibility to end it.”

A few days later, she went to Diamond City, to her apartment at Home Plate.  She opened a dresser.  She took off the necklace she had been wearing their wedding bands on.  She put it away.  She took the holodisk labeled _Hi honey!_ and placed it beside the necklace.

She closed the drawer.


End file.
